XPost: alt.ufo.reports

Ghost rockets are back. :)

Pilot reports UFO, says missile-like object flew over plane during
flight to Phoenix
USA Today, 27 Feb 2021 23:26Z
A pilot at American Airlines radioed Sun that an unidentified
object flew over their jet during a flight while they were ...

A good link for some back story is: <https://www.ufoinsight.com/ufos/waves/mystery-ghost-rockets-scandinavia>


While some intel people take the problem of (at least) what seem to be unauthorized (conventional) missiles shooting around nr the flight
paths of passenger aircraft *very* seriously, authorities have long
dismissed the whole phenomena as mistaken sightings of meteors.

Indeed, the data shows sightings of "long thin missile-like" UFO's tend
to pile up in Nov and Dec aka "meteor season".


From the NUFORC data we can create a list of "ghost rockets" from
approx the late 1930s. For this effort we'll accept as a GR anything
reported as cylindrical or cigar-shaped and also include reports
including at least 2 of the keywords long, lengthy, thin, slim,
slender, missile, rocket, contrail, or exhaust.

Broken down by decades the avg monthly sightings look like:

Decade Avg GR per mo
(The data has been adjusted to take into account NUFORC's web
reporting protocol that went into effect in early 2006).
1930 11.95
1940 11.95
1950 12.5789
1960 20.111
1970 25.0274
1980 17.1781
1990 19.5337
2000 21.7343
2010 18.3417
2020* 19.4167
* not complete

Which seems to show a more or less steady drum-beat of sightings
across N America with maybe an up-tick in the 60-70s and another one
around the 00s.

But the confounding part of the problem of GR comes when you line up
the number of sightings per month against the seasonal meteor
activity:

Meteor activity per month (avg numbers per hr):
Month /hr
1 563
2 569
3 569
4 647
5 650
6 650
7 779
8 788
9 823
10 830
11 853
12 1126
(Source: wikipedia).

Total GR sightings 1930- for each month:

Month Number of GR sightings since 1930
1 202
2 186
3 210
4 268
5 271
6 427
7 474
8 412
9 336
10 386
11 295
12 245

When we run a regression of monthly meteor activity against GR
sightings we get:

(Log transform for X and Y).
y = 4.84252 * x^0.624746
beta in 0.624746 +- 0.77917 90% CI
alpha in 1.57744 +- 5.13091
P(beta>0.000000) = 0.911598
calculated Spearman corr = 0.510490
Critical Spearman = 0.504000 2-sided at 5%; reject H0:not_connected
r2 = 0.17436746

Data:
Month #meteors #GR model-estimated #GR
(sightings/hr)
1 563 202 253.187
2 569 186 254.869*(est +1sd wrt obs) 3 569 210 254.869
4 647 268 276.168
5 650 271 276.967
6 650 427 276.967*(-1sd)
7 779 474 310.133*(-1sd)
8 788 412 312.367
9 823 336 320.964
10 830 386 322.667
11 853 295 328.224
12 1126 245 390.398*(+1sd)

Which shows there is a strong link between GR sightings and meteor
activity. Both usual tests -- a T-test on the \beta and a rank test
comparing the ordering of data by X and by Y -- show a better than 90% probability the link is not due to chance. Together they argue a high likelihood meteor activity is related to sightings of GR.

Given the regression produces a classic "power law" the model shows
for a doubling of meteor sightings/hr between say Mar and Dec there is
to be expected a 54% increase in ghost rocket sightings.

So the case is convincing that GR sightings involve meteor sightings
in some cases.


But the R2 above should warn stats-heads there are plenty of GR
sightings that seem not to involve mistaken sightings of annual meteor
shows. The R2 is 17% meaning month-to-month changes in number of
meteors/hr track only 17% of month-to-month changes in sightings of
GR. Assuming "all" GR are meteor sightings misses the 83% of GR
sightings that don't seem to be related to meteors.


We can run another test by comparing GR sightings against supposedly
validated sightings of meteors. The American Meteor Society maintains
a list of fireball sightings across N Am starting around 2005.
(See <https://www.amsmeteors.org/fireballs/fireball-report/>).

We can check month-by-month (or day-by-day if needed) how well
sightings of objects thought to be fireballs track sightings of
objects thought to be cylindrical UFO's with contrails that sometimes
are reported do drop 180 degree turns.

But we have to be careful. Like the UFO data there are various
"problems" with the fireball data. In the case of NUFORC sighting
data there was a bit methodology change in early 2006 when the group
created a web report form. Suddenly it was much easier to report a
UFO and about 10x more reports came in. We have to allow for this
using a program that finds multiplying UFO reports before Mar 2006 by
9.8 optimizes a certain statistic showing data before 2006 are not
"similar" to data after 2006.

In the case of the AMS fireball data it seems a change happened around
2011. Amazingly the same s/w finds numbers before 2011 need to be
adjusted by a factor of 10.3 to make data before 2011 "look like" data
after 2011. A similar factor. We might suspect the AMS also may have
intro'd a web report form -- this time around 2011.

Making the relevant adjustments to the 2 datasets a time-series
regression finds:

(AUTO CORR CORRECTION; estimated rho = -0.271987)
y = 0.007305*x + 1.70192
beta in 0.007305 +- 0.00611713 95% CI
alpha in 1.70192 +- 0.443871
P(beta>0.000000) = 0.989885
calculated Spearman corr = 0.190643
Critical Spearman = 0.306000 2-sided at 5%; accept H0:not_connected
r2 = 0.10319132
Durbin-Watson d = 2.546464
d > 4-dL (2.458421): Negative auto-corr at 5%

Binned data:
Bin label av #fireballs/mo av #GR from model-estimated #GR
from AMS NUFORC
2008.79 93.06 3 2.38173
2008.96 62.04 1 2.15513*
2010.88 103.4 4 2.45726*
2011.21 9 2 1.76767
2011.46 6 1.5 1.74575
2012.29 12 2.33333 1.78958
2012.38 5 2 1.73845
2012.54 10.255 1.75 1.77684
2012.62 15 1 1.8115
2012.79 25 1 1.88455*
2013.38 33 1 1.94299*
2013.46 20.5644 3 1.85215*
2013.62 24 1 1.87724*
2014.21 27 2 1.89916
2014.29 19 2.5 1.84072
2014.54 26 2 1.89185
2014.96 32 3.5 1.93568*
2015.12 34 2 1.95029
2015.21 46 2.5 2.03795
2015.29 30 1 1.92107*
2015.38 18 4 1.83341**
2015.46 29 3 1.91377*
2015.71 45 1 2.03065*
2015.96 31.0156 3 1.92849*
2016.38 16 2 1.8188
2016.46 44 1 2.02334*
2016.54 58 4 2.12561**
2016.79 70 1.5 2.21327
2016.88 81 3 2.29363
2017.29 35 2 1.9576
2017.38 37 1 1.97221*
2017.54 36 1.5 1.9649
2017.71 48 3 2.05256*
2017.79 73 3 2.23519
2017.88 99 1 2.42512*
2018.04 55 3 2.1037*
2018.21 57 2 2.11831
2018.46 40 2 1.99412
2018.62 51.4667 1.33333 2.07789
2018.71 56 1.5 2.111
2018.79 69 2 2.20597
2018.96 54 1.33333 2.09639
2019.46 38 1.5 1.97951
2019.54 41.2291 2 2.0031
2019.62 61 1.33333 2.14753
2019.96 86 1 2.33015*
2020.04 4 2 1.73114
2020.62 65 1.5 2.17675
2020.62 65 1.5 2.17675
2020.88 125 3 2.61505
2020.88 125 3 2.61505
2020.88 125 3 2.61505


In this s/w the data is binned/combined/smoothed. This has the effect
of losing some of the high-frequency noise in the data. I.e. any R2
will be an over-estimate of how much of the Y's are explained by the X's.

Months that seem to have similar #fireballs and #GR are put in the
same bin. The average of the points in the bin is computed and only
these averages are passed to a time-series sensitive regression.

In this case the TS regr found a -ve serial-correlation. It tends to
be the case when the number of fireballs and/or GR sightings go up in
one month, the next month they "retract" slightly. This kind of
behaviour is seen in situations where we're sampling from a finite
population. If you shoot and kill a few rabbits one month then the
next month there are slightly less rabbits around.

Again, the procedure is quite sure fireball sightings have *something*
to do with GR sightings. For each additional 100 fireballs sightings
across the US there are around .7 more GR sightings.

But the R2 statistic (which is -- remember -- an OVER ESTIMATE because
of the binning) shows that fireballs only explain about 10% of the GR sightings. 90% seem to be something else.

Taken together the data seems to be pointing at a connection between
meteors and ghost rockets. It is a "strong" relationship in that we
are quite sure it is there. But we are also quite sure a large
fraction of GR are not related to seasonal meteor shows or fireball sightings.

There is something else there.

In later posts we'll try to track down "affinities" GR have for
certain locations in the world.

It turns out like many other types of UFO long cylindrical objects
sometimes with contrails seem to vary as local conditions in quite
remote parts of the world (usually the polar oceans) on pretty much
the same day. When "flying conditions" seem to be good in select
locations -- good visibility, thin ice, no hurricanes, etc -- GR
sightings seem to be higher than when flying conditions are not so
good. The same locations turn up again and again in this kind of
calculation and many of the locations also turn up at beyond-chance
levels on lists of locations with a long history of "very odd happenings".

--
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* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)